Paul's Camera

Published Nov. 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Two weeks ago I wrote about the loss of a camera that had been given to me by Paul Taylor 35+ years ago.  I called it “Dorothea’s” camera because I believed it had belonged to his wife, Dorothea Lange.  It matched photos of one she used in the field when the two of them documented the stream of immigrants into California who’d been displaced from their land in the Dust Bowl.

     The camera was returned to me last week, intact.  The story of how it was returned will have to wait until the case of the other missing items is resolved, but it’s one I will chalk up to Lindsay’s inherent goodness when the time comes.  Our town is still a place where love can do its work.  Make no mistake about that.

           

     Before it reappeared, I was searching for people who might be able to ID the camera and establish its worth.  I found Elizabeth Partridge, author of Restless Spirit:  The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998).  She’s also the daughter of Rondal Partridge, who had been Dorothea’s field assistant.  When the camera came home, I saw that it was a Zeiss IKON, not the Zeiss Jewel shown in her book.  I emailed her to report the distinction and the good news.

     She wrote back instantly on her iPhone, but referred to the camera as “Grandpa Paul’s.” Then she reminded me of his photographic work before he met Dorothea:  “Paul’s early work, though no great shakes in terms of beautiful photos, was so brave and thoughtful of him to dare to do.”

           

     The revelation that it might be Paul’s camera rather than Dorothea’s riveted me.  It sent me back to the one book I own where his photographs are shown, a book of farmworker photographs by Ken Light, Roger Minick and Resa Tansey called In The Fields (1982.)  Paul had written the introduction with labor historian Anne Loftis and included some of his photographs from his extensive study of Imperial Valley farm labor conditions in the late 1920’s.  But they also included a shot of a billboard for Tagus Ranch advertising for cotton pickers in 1927, just five years before the cotton strikes in Pixley and Corcoran. Paul had been here in our valley, too.

     What was really brave about Paul was not so much that he took and used photos, but his whole approach, which could be called “ethnographic” in academic terms.  Economics, his field, was becoming so statistical that it is almost unrecognizable as a social science today.  But Paul asked questions of the people he studied and wrote down what they said, and he photographed the places they lived and worked, a form of shorthand notetaking that carried these conditions 90 years into the future.  His economic analysis of the Imperial Valley is now highly esteemed.

           

     I’m keeping Paul’s camera with me until I’ve finished the work he sent me to do.  Onward, friends.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial researcher who writes to stay sane.  Thanks to John Kirkpatrick for his sympathetic phone call last week.  Send your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247or leave a comment below.

 

 

Come High Water

Published Feb. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Storm warnings, high wind advisories, flood watches, evacuation orders pending – what a week.  For some, this week’s weather is foreboding and dreary, perhaps even a sign.  But for me there’s something holy, even righteous about it.  It’s been a long time since I felt this at-home in California. 

     At first, when it was just the prospect of full reservoirs for the first time this decade, the water watchdogs warned not to get too hopeful that our five-year drought is over.  “There’s still the groundwater table in overdraft,” they chided, reminding us that the big boys’ long straws have been oversucking from it so long there might be no replenishment possible.

     Then the reservoirs had to start releasing water just to keep the bounty from breaking the dams and to maintain some semblance of flood control.  Oroville, one of the newer dams in California’s massive water development system, reminded us that facilities age and that infrastructure must be maintained to be of true value.  Then levees broke in the Alpaugh Irrigation District as the flood flows of multiple creeks in the Tule and Kern River watersheds accumulated and ended up where they belong, in the old bed of Tulare Lake, which they do every once in a while, come hell or high water (literally.)

     To the north of us, levees along the length of the mighty San Joaquin are promising a similar replenishment.  Old valley communities like Vernalis, Stevinson and Tranquility are likely not so tranquil right now, as the attempt to keep flood flows off the farmland threatens to drown out the farmworker communities.  It’s a trade-off we still haven’t found a way to make correctly.

  "It’s too bad,” a friend who grows olives told me Sunday, “all this water going to waste.  LSID cut us off completely the last two years, and yet now, here’s all this water….”  His voice trailed off into the mystery of the moment.  “It’s not going to waste,” I wanted to cry, though I kept my protest to myself since I don’t farm.  In fact, when it spills out onto the land, it brings life to the soil as well as improving the groundwater supplies.  In fact, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do in God’s holy hydrologic cycle.  Here all this time we’ve been praying for rain, and now we’re going to complain about where He puts it?

     Down in Alpaugh, when the levees broke this time, the big boys hired helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags on the break, stemming the flow for now.  But it’s kinda like working on old cars:  installing a new part often puts pressure somewhere else, causing another part to break.  The history of farming the Tulare Lake bed is full of stories about heroic flood prevention efforts by the large landowners causing storm water to take out some small guys’ operations.  At least that water’s not wasting to the ocean, right?

     This drought-flood pattern is part of California’s natural cycle, at least so far.  I’m comforted by the return of the wet half of our true nature, glad we haven’t yet reached the point where the rains are always meager, the snowfall non-existent, where the floods never come.  We would do well to plan for this pattern, to accommodate the extremes, not the averages, and then try everything in our power to keep from altering it.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who once wanted to be a hydrologist.  You can send her your favorite high water stories c/o P.O Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

Carving the Future

Published Nov. 23, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the eighth report from the Reedley Peace Center, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

           

     “My mother thought I should be the first American Pope,” Tom Willey confided to his large, warm audience Friday night.  He was explaining why she’d set foot on his farm only once during his entire career producing food from the soil, suggesting that she thought it was a waste of his fine Berkeley education.  Others might have thought the same, but it was clear to me that this thinking man and his brilliant wife Denesse of T & D Willey Farms have successfully applied themselves to one of the most intractable problems of California Agriculture:  saving the family farm.

     They’ve done it first-hand, by example and by experiment, by comprehending the difficulties and overcoming them.  They’ve also done it by understanding the culture and the sociology of small-scale farming:  the critical role family and neighbors play in making farms sustainable, as well as soils and water supplies.  They’ve done it by understanding the political forces undermining family farms, and the historical precedents of empires built on water shortage in semi-deserts dependent on irrigation.  They’ve done it by recognizing the needs of the eating public and filling them with good, nutritious food picked and packed by the hands of well-paid laborers.

    They started by leasing 20 acres east of Fresno, with Tom farming while Denesse kept the bills paid with her nursing jobs.  It was “profitless,” Tom said, until they went organic.  He was mentored by two neighbors, a Japanese farmer named George Yagi and a Black farmer named Leon Poe, who taught him the ropes.  In 1984, Denesse gave up nursing and dedicated herself to the marketing end through farmer’s markets.  In 1995 they purchased 80 acres in Madera County, gradually moving toward selling their vegetables directly to subscribers through their CSA.

     “We wanted to demonstrate that a couple could make a decent middle-class living growing people’s food,” Tom said, noting that their net income over the last 10 or 15 years varied from $60,000 to a whopping $300,000 one year.  “We’ve fed 800 families over the last 12 years,” Tom said, “which was the most rewarding, the most profitable, and the most exhausting” enterprise yet.

           

      And when this fall’s eggplant crop is done, they will be finished.  The Willey’s are retiring from farming, not failing.  “After 40 years, I’ve gotten producing mountains of vegetables out of my system,” he proclaimed.  They’re retiring with a decent income to continue their other vocational interests.  In Tom’s case, that’s writing, education and his radio work, primarily his program “Down on the Farm” on KFCF (FM 88.1).  Their CSA business has been transferred to Fresno’s Food Commons, where young people are being mentored by experienced hands like the Willey’s in developing the local food system this country needs.

     Despite their success, Tom Willey understands the forces working against sustainable, small-scale farms and food distribution systems.  The political power of agribusiness he describes as a “floodtide,” noting the current efforts by Westlands Water District to cinch their deal with the Feds as just one example. He believes that the sustainable, polycrop farm system that feeds and employs people well on the land is in deep jeopardy, as close to extinction as the Delta smelt if we do not act, become educated and politically engaged, particularly in decisions determining water distribution.

           

     His advice?  Those of you who know how to farm, find ways to mentor those young people who are trying to learn; help them find new ways for this alternative farming system to emerge and thrive.  Don’t let your knowledge die with you:  pass it on.

     For the rest of us, get involved in the political process.  Go to those “tedious, ding-dong meetings” regarding water transfers and groundwater regulation, land use planning and budgets.  Why?  “When things are really screwed up,” Tom stated, “I believe that equals great opportunity.”

     “There’s a way to do it,” he said, summing up the path they’ve carved, as well as his hope for the future.  We simply have to work together to make it happen.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fourth generation failed family farmer who writes.  You can send your carvings to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

We Can Change

Published Oct. 12, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Friday I flew home from work, changed my socks, grabbed the potluck plates, and jumped in the truck to haul it to Reedley for the third presentation in the Peace Center’s speakers series, ”In the Struggle.”  Don Villarejo, who formed and directed the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis where I was employed before moving to Lindsay, was scheduled to speak on the question “Can we achieve an ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just agriculture?”  I didn’t want to miss one minute of it.

           

     The truth is, anyone living here in the San Joaquin Valley with even one eye open can see that the answer is “no.”  Too much would have to change, it seems.  Too many bolts holding the current system in place would have to be loosened and removed, and there’s no guarantee that chaos would not overtake us before that new, beautiful and right thing would take hold.  Housing developments gobbling up farmland, bullet trains delivering commuters to their concreted plots, mechanization replacing workers and farmers faster than we can count – these things are already pushing the margins of the old system toward extinction.

     But there he was, eating from his plate of homemade salads and hot dishes, preparing to speak to a mixed, mostly hopeful crowd of friends and strangers, bringing a message that no one could really imagine.  Almost 80, Don’s smile and laugh are as disarming and infectious as the first time I met him.  And his 60-year story of inviting people to join him in this struggle, that stretches well beyond one lifetime, delivered this message:  we can change.

           

     He himself went through several transformations in order to become the change agent he is.  Son of a single-mother labor organizer, his childhood was spent frequently living under other people’s roofs and sets of rules.  Don’t ask me how, but he went to college anyway and graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Chicago, a big enough life change for most people.  Then, while teaching physics at UCLA, he found himself drawn into the student politics of change.  There, at one critical moment before 12 TV news station cameras, with the whole country watching and most of the university’s administration waiting to hear calming words of conventional reason,  he tossed that life aside and said “Strike!  Shut this place down!”  His mother must have known then that he was a chip off the old she-block.

     But what Don brought to the world of social change was a tremendous respect for facts and figures and the truths they represent.  In his talk he told stories of discovering the untruths told with shoddy facts and figures, and how he amassed data, over and over, to uncover the truths the old numbers belied:  the numbers and sizes of farm ownerships and operations in the state, the public subsidies and financial returns to farms in federally-supplied water districts and the family structure of most operations.  He documented the outcomes of various attempts to get laws changed governing farm labor, noting the victories within apparent defeats.  He named names of people who contributed their lives over the years, the tiny but critical roles they played at just the right moments.  By the end we could see that our view of the unchangability of our current agricultural system is obscured by fear – or, perhaps, by lack of faith.

           

     The questions people brought to the microphone afterward were mixed with awe and appreciation for what we had just learned, still sinking in.  One person thanked Don for including farmers and their unpaid family members as two categories of farm labor, his own hands showing the work of his life.  Another queried Don’s opinion on the recent state legislation increasing farm workers’ compensation, including overtime, to which he replied that it’s 70 years overdue, although he has no idea how it’s going to work out.

           
     But the last question took my breath away.  A man, a newcomer to the group, described the dilemma we face with the drought-driven explosion of deep-well pumping of groundwater, of the extraction for private purposes of a precious resource held in common, noting the lack of legal recourse.  Although Don had been standing for almost two hours, it was as if he jumped to his feet.   “We can change that,” he said firmly.  “We can change the laws.  People like us in this room, we can change that.”
           
     I give him the last word on that subject.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer and remedial change agent who lives in Lindsay, once the Olive Capitol of the World.  You can send her your thoughts on change c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Town and Field

Published Oct. 5, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the second report from Reedley, where the Reedley Peace Center at First Mennonite Church is sponsoring a public speakers series called “In the Struggle.”  The speakers are presenting information about past and present attempts to promote a better agricultural system in this valley, and will conclude with prospects for the future.
 

     The second speaker in our series (Friday, Sept. 30,) was Dan O’Connell, whose doctoral dissertation forms the core of the series. His research covered the public contributions of 6 California scholars who examined the social, economic and political costs of our industrialized agricultural system.  Friday night he discussed three of those scholars, now deceased:  Paul S. Taylor, Walter R. Goldschmidt, and Ernesto Galarza.

           

     Paul Taylor, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, began his academic career researching farm labor, and ended it documenting the ways agribusiness giants prevented the enforcement of the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law.  He also advocated for enforcement of the law and worked politically to prevent its demise.  He supported research efforts demonstrating the importance of the acreage limitation, such as the studies documenting the community development impacts of large-scale farms and the positive contributions of small-scale farm cooperatives.  He also supported non-profit groups such as Fresno’s National Land for People, led by George Ballis and individuals like Ben Yellen, M.D. in Imperial Valley, who were working politically and through the courts to get the law enforced.

     Paul’s early efforts documenting Mexican farm labor in Imperial Valley (1920’s) transitioned to documenting the in-migration of Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930’s.  Like their Mexican predecessors, the Okies were former farmers-turned-farm laborers when they were swept off the land.  With his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, Taylor documented the terrible conditions of these refugees and then helped create government labor camps and resettlement programs to begin to alleviate these conditions.

     Paul’s work in the field of farm labor was followed by the heroic efforts of Ernesto Galarza, who documented the Bracero Program and worked to organize a union for farm laborers.  Through this work Galarza recognized first-hand that the Bracero Program, which was begun during WWII to provide Mexican farm laborers for California’s farms while Americans were away at war or occupied in the arms factories, was being use to prevent union organizing efforts from succeeding.  Galarza’s efforts to create a union failed, but he succeeded in bringing the Bracero Program to an end in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of WWII.  Shortly thereafter, the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta began, as well as efforts to provide the legislation needed to make union protection of farm workers possible in this state.

 

     Paul Taylor’s research on farm laborers, Mexican and Okie alike, took him to his work on the acreage limitation provisions, which, if enforced, could have provided the doorway for those laborers to return to their real occupation as farmers.  During the battles in Congress to authorize and make appropriations for the Central Valley Project, which California’s large farmers claimed should be exempt from the acreage limitation provisions, he helped construct and then supervised the examination of the effect of farm size on rural communities, which became known as the Arvin-Dinuba Study.  The study was conducted by a young anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, who determined that small farms created communities that were much healthier economically, socially and politically than the towns surrounded by large-scale (and often absentee) farm operations.   Goldschmidt, whose career as an anthropologist included studies of multiple indigenous tribes and cultures on three continents, was called back to testify at Congressional hearings on the results of this study from the beginning of his career until a few years before his death at age 96.

     What we see, looking at the active, engaged scholarly careers of Taylor, Goldschmidt and Galarza, is that the hidden impacts of our industrialized agricultural system cover the entire range of concerns in this valley, from the development of the towns to the conditions in the fields and back into the towns again.  In the next two talks, we will see how other scholars have continued this work, from Don Villarejo’s research to document the increasing agricultural concentration of power and wealth and farmworker advocacy (Oct. 7^th) to Dean MacCannell’s extension of Goldschmidt’s community research at the macrosocial level, examining the influence of farm size on 70 San Joaquin Valley towns (Oct. 14^th.) 

     Come join us. For more information on the series, visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “calendar.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher and advocate who writes.  You can read last week’s column below.  Many thanks to Chris Brewer for his lifelong devotion to the history of our region.